Content Site Picks on Flippa
In this week's content site picks on Flippa I look into a local lifestyle site, and look deep into business directory sites...
Every week I pick new content sites and media property listings on Flippa that look interesting to me in terms of the asset and what we can learn, from three different revenue buckets. If you haven’t already, you can subscribe below:
Please view this as initial screening - I am not recommending you should acquire these assets. Do you own due diligence and/or buy DD on Flippa or Centurica.
For my criteria and terminology see this post.
As a Flippa affiliate, I earn a % of what Flippa earns from listings sold.Small Content Sites - acquire.gg/small-websites
Revenue-generating websites making $100-$499/m in profit
connecticutlifestyles.com - $5,500 reserve price
If you live in or love CT, or are a fan of picking up local sites this could be one for you.
Need to get access to GA and add a segment for search traffic for this one, as Semrush is showing that it got hit by the 12th September Core Update:
But the GA integration in the listing shows that unique users have been steady, with pageviews growing last month. And Ubersuggest is corroborating with this, showing an uptick (it just updated it’s traffic estimation for the month of September):
I used to use Ahrefs when did these content site deal picks as part of the paid membership of the Website Investing publication on Substack:
With over 6000 pages in the google index and the top 20 bringing in 85% of search traffic, there is potential upside from doing a content audit and removing a large number of pages from the google index.
The top page https://connecticutlifestyles.com/what-to-do-this-weekend-in-connecticut/ brings in 31% search traffic according to Semrush which is obviously high, so page dependency here. But as there’s less than 100 words on that page, and it’s only ranking middle of page 1 for it’s biggest keyword ‘things to do in ct this weekend’ which has a keyword difficulty of 3 (out of 100!), this feels more like an upside opportunity rather than a risk. Adding more content will likely boost it towards the top of p1, especially as the page that’s ranking top has even less body copy.
The reserve price puts this at a 41x multiple which isn’t unreasonable for a site with such a low monthly profit, if it’s not hit from the recent google update.
Medium Content Sites - acquire.gg/medium-websites
Revenue-generating websites making $500-$4,999/m in profit
I didn’t previously pick directory sites (see what I define as true content sites), but with all the great “programmatic SEO” content that people like Ian Nuttall have been putting out on Twitter (and on his blog) these types of listings now pique my interest:
Two business directory listings have just been made live on Flippa, one is targeting the UK and the other the US, listed by a first-time seller. Both listings have GA integrated and have had traffic and revenue vetted by Flippa:
listedinusa.com - asking price $140,000
listedin.co.uk - asking price $145,965
These sites are stated to make money from premium upgrade options to the tune of $5K a month (used to be more for the UK one before our pound tanked!), and have a reasonable 2.5x annual profit multiple (ah the good old 30x days).
Below is an analysis on the UK site, but then I bring it back to both sites at the bottom.
The UK site is said to be 9 years old, with Whois showing the domain registered on 17-Jul-2011, however, Internet Archive does not show anything which is strange.
The site has large overall traffic with 140K pageviews a month but the GA integration only shows 2000 (13%) of that is coming from search. Semrush is only showing 200 visits a month from search but Ubersuggest is showing 700 a month, down from 1200 a month a year ago. Almost all search traffic goes to the homepage.
As such, the vast majority of traffic shown in GA is ‘direct traffic’ so you would need to ask the seller why this is the case and what this actually is.
On the backlinks front, Semrush is showing the largest number of links (over 1000) is coming from https://fanooslaw.com/ which I’m not saying is a PBN, but sure looks like it could be from the homepage blogroll with so many categories (I used to do play this game). Let’s just say the profile doesn’t look squeaky clean to me.
To complicate matters, the site isn’t built on Wordpress and broken links get met with an old-school HTTP Error 404.0 page. There are over 8000 pages in the google index which is impressive to me as if I pick the first internal page showing at site:http://listedin.co.uk/ - which is ironically a PPC company called Acquire.co.uk (I still prefer my .gg) - it has less than 30 words on it:
Yet Google still hasn’t indexed some AI content of mine with over 1000 words on it!
The US site, however, looks to have been on the http://listedin.biz/ domain which only has 800 pages in the Google index, and it now redirects to https://www.listedinusa.com/ which only has 4 pages in the google index…
If there is a large repeat buyer base for premium listings this may be something to consider. But in terms of traffic and links, go deep with your DD on these.
Large Content Sites - acquire.gg/boss-websites
Revenue-generating websites making over $5000/m in profit - job replacement income.
Nothing new I can pick that is not a confidential listing (under NDA) this week.
That’s it for this week’s content site picks. If you’ve not yet subscribed here’s the CTA for you:
And come follow me on twitter.
Cheers!
Richard